Today's product development process has witnessed tremendous change in recent years. Product development cycles, as well as their life spans, are getting shorter. More and more outsourcing of components results in increasing coordination and collaboration among various institutions within an enterprise, and across enterprises. Increasing globalization separates various project partners by space and time zones. Moreover, design activity is becoming more and more a joint effort of a highly qualified team. Participants in the design process contribute what they can in their different domains of expertise.
Collaborative shape design systems are slowly becoming a reality with the advent of the Internet and more powerful computers. Collaboration for product shape design, however, requires considerably broader capabilities than most other applications. For example, current computer-aided design (CAD) systems are designed to function as standalone programs. The front end, the libraries, the data, and the processor are present on the same computer. There is a growing need to move from standalone systems to collaborative systems, in which people located in different geographic locations can provide their input concurrently. The architecture for the current CAD systems cannot be extended to make it work in a distributed environment. There are systems that can provide collaborative viewing of a model, but these systems do not provide collaborative shape creation, editing, and deletion, particularly at the client end. Consequently, many aspects of collaborative product shape design have not been realized.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need for the present invention.